


Unsuitable Men and other Cosmic Hazards

by Tawabids



Category: Doctor Who (2005), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Crossover, Kidfic, M/M, Minor Character Death, Semi-linear storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-29
Updated: 2012-09-29
Packaged: 2017-11-15 06:10:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/523991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tawabids/pseuds/Tawabids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the Eleventh Doctor is Erik Lehnsherr's father-in-law, and does not approve of him <i>at all</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unsuitable Men and other Cosmic Hazards

**Author's Note:**

> Some time ago I wrote a fill for an [X-Men First Kink prompt](http://xmen-firstkink.livejournal.com/5215.html?thread=6804063), entitled "The Nazi Hunter and The Telepath. Good for them." The prompt was: _Charles was raised by Eleven before the wedding of river song. Erik was Ten's companion for a year after Martha. Charles heard as much stories of Erik-the-nazi-hunter from Eleven while he was growing up as stories of DoctorDonna, Rose Tyler, The Girl who waited or The Lone Centurion. The Doctor never told him he would actually meet Erik and fall in love years later thought._
> 
> It seemed to get a good reception, so here is the cleaned-up repost. Alright, I'm not going to lie, this was one of the most fun things to write _ever_.

Well yes, I'll _try_ to tell it linearly. Not chronologically, obviously, that would make no sense at all. It'd be easiest to tell it as _ra'var(µ)!y_ like the Travelling Falmadorians do - a branched story in multiple axes of time - but human brains aren't really evolved to understand it like that. So we'll try linear. 

It starts off in Westchester, Earth, in 1937. Or maybe it starts off in the village of Milton Keynes in 1959. We're already running into problems, aren't we? For me it started in Milton Keynes, 1959. I was a real rake back then, I wore Chucks like all the cool kids and spectacles with ordinary glass in the lens to make myself look smarter. I think I was trying to prove that Brigadair Lethbridge-Stewart did not enter public service with a moustache - I only remember I'd brought a camera with me, and it started capturing very strange images from around the village. Naturally, I decided to investigate.

It turned out I wasn't the only stranger in town noticing the oddness. The other visitor was a very young, very angry man named Erik Lehnsherr. Working independently and without even being introduced, we accidentally saved the town from a parasitic brain-worm that had been carried in the cerebellum of a Nazi officer since a crash-landing covered up by the Germans in World War Two. Long story short - this scamp Erik found my TARDIS while I was busying cleaning up the brain-worm disaster, and I didn't catch the stowaway until we were in the Cold Dwarf Caverns of Lyra, when he sort of - well, he does come in handy, especially since the Cold Dwarf Caverns are composed mainly of ultra-magnetic iron alloys. I'm not saying I _couldn't_ have saved Her Royal Stoutliness without his help, I'm just saying he was a bit handy. 

And I wasn't going to _keep_ him around. I think I needed a lot of feedback in those days, and Erik and I just ended up trying to outdo each other on the question of whether brilliant Time Lord brains or silly metal-bending magic is a more effective tool for saving the day. Obviously I won, not that I was keeping score, and anyway the point is that team work is always the best method of disarming large alien warfleets (even if you think you've tricked their leader into activating traditional protocol for the arrival of their deity but it turns out half of them are faking it and luckily Erik's powers work fine in zero gravity or certain refugee moons would be microscopic particles of dust right now). But I digress.

Anyway, we had a ridiculous slew of adventures and before long I couldn't imagine letting Erik go, and that's always when I make mistakes. You see, he started to talk about this man he'd always wanted to see again, who'd protected him during the war. He'd never been able to find him because the man had changed his name. But Erik claimed to have a few scraps of information, and because it seemed to mean so much to him, we went back to Earth and tracked the fellow down. Only it turned out this man hadn't protected Erik except in the most liberal sense - he'd murdered Erik's mother and experimented on him as a child, the monster. And Erik didn't want to thank him. He wanted to kill him, and he managed it, and even damaged my darling ship when I tried to stop him. He made me complicit in murder, and more painfully, he lied about his intentions because he knew I'd disapprove. 

Well, that was it. I told him he'd never step foot on my TARDIS again, and I would have had him arrested if he hadn't slipped away as he is so good at doing. He didn’t even pretend he wanted my forgiveness. It felt like the most terrible betrayal, and I constantly questioned how I hadn't seen it coming. 

I saw Erik only once more (for the purposes of this branch of the story), which was sometime after the planets in the sky but before Gallifrey in the sky, though I can't pinpoint it exactly. I'd been trapped by the Senate of Aither, worshippers of Metis and blah-dee-blah, who abhor time travellers and designed the cosmic nets of Nyx to cleanse the universe of them one by one. Pretentious bunch, I'm not at all sorry they all decide to sterilise themselves in their fourth century. At any rate, I ended up being put on trial for time travelling, which naturally is punished by death when you're a culture of raving, anti-fun lunatics. And who should be on trial beside me but Erik Lehnsherr. Looking a little older and grey in the temples but otherwise quite as stubborn as ever, blast him. 

"I hope you know," I said to him, as we both stood in the dock - quite literally, as Aither is an ocean planet - "how very much I resent the fact that I'm going to have to bust you out of here. How on earth did you get your hands on time-travelling technology, anyway?"

"Oh, you don't need to bust me out," he said, positively disdainful at my offer. "My husband will be along shortly. He's the time-traveller, not me."

"Who in the whole blasted universe did you trick into marrying you?" I gaped at him. "I hope there wasn't murder and blackmail involved."

"If you're going to be a grouchy cod about it, I'll leave you here to get executed, old man," he replied, just as the harbour behind us evaporated in a flash of purple light. And the next thing we knew there was this blue-eyed man with a time-hopping thing-a-me-bob that looked like he’d cobbled it together out of bits of dead Meissner converters, and we were all running for our lives, and somehow I managed to drag us all back to the TARDIS. I was going one way and the two of them were heading off with their dodgy little time cutlery ( _machine_ is too sophisticated a word for that thing), and Erik’s husband held his hand out to me and said, "Oh hello, I'm don't think we've met by the way, I'm-" but Erik slapped his palm over his mouth and stopped him. 

"What's that for?" I asked.

"Last Christmas eve," he snarled. And of course, before I could demand an explanation, there were ray beams smashing into the decor around us and we split. I high-tailed it out in my TARDIS and I hoped that they’d made it alright, but I thought, _It's a big universe, that's bound to be the last I see of them_. 

After that, friends came and went. I got a new face, a new outlook and bowtie and even picked up a married couple for a while, good gracious, then let them go again (and then picked the up again, and again, but that’s another story that didn’t happen until later). And that's when we finally get to Westcester in nineteen-thirty-nine. 

I hadn't meant to be there, you know. I was meant to be in seventeen-eighty-four, picking up a decent copy of a lost Goya print for a friend - I swear it was one of those world-saving favours and I totally wasn't just trying to cheer her up because she was having a bad day. Anyway, the TARDIS dumped me in Westchester and I found there'd been a murder - a very rich widow in a very big house. _That’s interesting_ , I thought, and while I was helping the coppers solve the murder because I'm just that good, I noticed that there was photos of a little boy scattered throughout the house, yet nobody seemed to know anything about where he was. 

Eventually the coppers seemed to have their man, so I headed off, but the TARDIS wouldn’t leave. I spend two hours sitting stupidly on the front lawn of the big old house fiddling around under the console and she just _wouldn’t_. And finally I noticed she had her psychic filters set to receive at full blast, which was odd, because I'm not exactly deaf to psychic residue myself but I couldn’t hear a damn thing. That was until I rummaged up a pair of silver ears - birthday present from Glinda the Good Witch, you know, oh yes, it is a documentary from the future - and I tuned them to reverse the cerebral polarity, and what do you know? 

It was like that drawing of a face that doesn't appear until you look at a white surface and the afterimage stays on your eyeballs. 

The boy had been in the house all along. He was hiding in a cupboard, and he'd been telepathically broadcasting louder than any human I've ever seen, only what he was broadcasting was _I'm not here_. Over and over, so intensely that even I didn't realise my brain was getting fiddled with. And I went in and found him, and he was just this wee thing about five years old, been sitting in that cupboard for almost two days without food or water. I convinced him it was safe to come out, and finally he quietened that incredibly powerful mind of his - and I realised all those coppers and servants and helpful neighbours and even the jealous fiancé who supposedly did the deed? Every single one of them was possessed by an intergalatic collector. It had all been a charade. They had killed the rich widow, they'd been looking for the boy all along. But they clearly didn't account for me in their plans. People really should have a Plan D, for Doctor. 

So we escaped that nightmare and I took us to a quiet patch of dormant stars and set the engines on silent and tried to figure him out. I won’t lie. He was the most remarkable child. I know a mutant when I see one, sure, but this one had come into his powers so young and so loudly. He’d been born with the sort of abilities most civilisations don’t invent until after interstellar time travel. But I don’t count the TARDIS as a child-proof zone, so I found a nice family in London, 2001, to take him in. I thought _that’s nice, good job Doctor,_ and I patted myself on the back. And six weeks later – by his time, not mine, I can’t remember everything that I got up to in that time – my psychic paper went black and I knew it had to be him. I went back in London, 2001, and the little boy was sitting in another house full of corpses because Torchwood One had gone and tried to bring him in for ‘Classified Research Purposes’ and he’d reacted so badly he’d given his foster parents and seven telepathy-trained agents massive brain haemorrhages.

“Please don’t go away again,” he sobbed, when I finally eased him out of his shock. “I’ll hurt someone else, please don’t go. You’re the only one whose thoughts I can’t hear.”

What else was I supposed to do? I took him with me. And that’s how I became a single dad, age nearly-eleven-hundred, of a wee boy named Charles who could blow up your brain by accident if you popped a paper bag beside his ear. 

Biggest adventure of my life, or certainly in the top ten. Top ten biggest, top ten best. I’m not going to lie. I picked a good kid to adopt – or he picked me, who knows?

I’m not saying I was the most diligent father. All humans are a bit stupid, it’s not their fault, but I forget that when you’re very small and very curious and get bored very easily, being a bit stupid is kind of a dangerous thing. So yes, there were several incidents when I almost got him killed – I still have nightmares about the carnival giants, brrr – and there were several more where I sort of wanted to kill him myself, but thankfully those moments passed. I did my best to teach him important things like geometry and how to make balloon animals and emergency TARDIS protocols. I wasn’t quite so good at teaching him self-restraint, the rules of punctuation or how to maintain dignity in front of monarchs. I like to think I did a very good job at history. And running. 

And of course, I told him stories. All the time, every minute that he was awake, I told him all the non-explicit stories I’ve collected in my long life. Sooner or later I was running low on the stories of all my favourite people, and I started telling stories about some of my less-favourite people. And it was funny, how he seemed to like the ones about Erik the best.

“Tell me again,” he would say, lying in the hammock I had slung in the corner of the console room where I could keep an eye on him (there was always the risk, you know, that bits of the TARDIS could get lost during re-entry), “about the time you and Erik survived the Six Heads of the Robot Scylla.”

“Why do you always want to hear about Erik?” I asked.

“I don’t know. They’re exciting.”

“But he was mean,” I insisted.

“That’s what makes it exciting. You don’t pretend everything was lovely and sweet when you talk about him. You tell the truth.”

“I always tell you the truth. Oi, have you been reading my mind?” I frowned. “Can you do that now? You should warn me, there’s all sorts of thoughts in here that aren’t appropriate for babies.”

“I can’t read you, it’s just obvious. And I’m not a baby!” 

“You are to me, baby-boy.”

“I’m not! I’m not!” he giggled, and threw his stuffed chimera at me.

Quite suddenly – I do forget, sometimes, how fast humans change – he was a teenager and stopped sleeping with stuffed toys, or looking up at me with his big blue eyes whenever he wanted an alien ice-lolly, or listening to me when I told him ‘no’. I thought raising a boy would be easy – you don’t have to pretend they’re male when you go back any earlier than the nineteenth century, it’s easier to find them somewhere to pee on an alien planet, and most of them can’t get pregnant. The only thing I had to keep an eye out for was if he tried to join an army or get arrested, right? 

Oh, Doctor, you can be so wrong sometimes.

I don’t know when I first saw it. The idea must have grown in me quietly, a little seed of déjà vu. Where had I seen his face before? Had I known his son, or bumped into some adult version of my Charles in an alternate universe? And then one day I knew – or realised I had known for some time – where we had met. 

The High Court of Aither. The time-traveller with a cobbled-together Meissner converter. Erik’s husband.

 _Not on my watch,_ I thought. Time can be rewritten. The idea that this was not something an old man like me should meddle with did not occur to me – I was his father, I had experience in these matters, I’d been through my own share of disastrous relationships (alright, one disastrous relationship, but he turned out to be a genocidal maniac, didn’t he?). I wouldn’t let Charles’ heart get broken by a revenge-driven mutant with a downright creepy grin. 

Of course, he was already getting difficult to control. By the time he was the linear equivalent of seventeen earth years, Charles was getting his hands on intergalactic spaceships and vortex manipulators and running away from the TARDIS at every opportunity. I tell you, there were plenty of times I considered a leash. And the boys he tried to bring home – I’m blushing just thinking about it. “No,” I said. “While you live under my time-vortex ultra-shield, you obey my rules. That means no… no… well, you can insert your own euphemism, you know what I mean. Not in my ship.”

 _Not in my ship_. I knew I was a bad parent sometimes, but boy was that a whopper of a mistake. And I never told him why, never sat him down and said _I know things about your future_ , I just sort of bumbled along in a constant state of panic like every mother and father whose children I had ever swept up into the storm of the universe’s mysteries. 

And I tried to avoid the twentieth century, of course. Erik could not be far outside it, and if they never met, it would never happen.

But either the TARDIS considered herself a better judge of character, or maybe she was just having an off day, because of course we ended up in nineteen-sixty-two, right when the good ol’ You-Ess-of-Ay was simultaneously having an international crisis with Russia and dealing with the first emergence of the mutant race. I lost track of Charles for three days – there were missiles and the Wolves of Fenric to deal with, alright? – and when he returned he was _sneaky_. There was something he wasn’t telling me.

I didn’t push the matter, because it had been another very close call for the earth and I was just glad he was safe. But he started to disappear more and more often after that. Sometimes he’d aged weeks or months, though he tried to tell me I was just being paranoid. I tried jamming each new vortex manipulator, but he’d long figured out how to build his own sonic screwdrivers and he un-jammed them easily. I told him they were too dangerous to use and took them all away, but he started building his own time-hopping devices – using pieces of broken Meissner convertors, a collection I’d quite forgotten about stored in the depths of the TARDIS, that I’d picked up decades earlier to stop their fuel cores leaking into the Cyan Ocean of Nist. 

It was all coming full circle. 

And then one day, my baby boy was just gone. I waited, my ship perched on the headland of King Æthelwulf in the eighth century. I waited for days, but he was a time-traveller. If he’d wanted to come back, he would have done it by now.

So I went back to travelling alone. After all that time, it was… strange. I’d forgotten how free a person could become, how reckless, when he didn’t have a small person clinging to his sleeve at all times. I moved on, as I always do. Companions come and go. 

A long time later, there came a knock on my door. I think I was on a public park somewhere in the twenty-second century, and I assumed it was just a traffic warden coming to tell me I had to move my vehicle on. I opened the door to tell him what a glorious day it was and why didn’t he come in for a cup of tea and forget about this ticketing nonsense. 

It wasn’t a traffic warden. It was Charles, my baby-boy, looking a little older and a lot more worn, with at least three different centuries of fashion in his clothes and a leather backpack which I could just _smell_ was full of Meissner converter energy. His hand was clutched around the hand of another man I recognised without a moment to pause.

“Doctor,” Erik nodded, his chin jutting out.

“Erik,” I growled, leaning against the TARDIS doorway. 

“Dad,” said Charles, smiling the baby-faced smile that he’d never grown out of. 

After about four of five seconds of absolute, unfathomably painful awkward silence, I said. “Why don’t you both come in? I just put the kettle on for the traffic warden.”

And that was how I stopped being a single dad and started being a father-in-law.

(And Erik had been right; the next Christmas dinner was a nightmare.)


End file.
